Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

March 2025

Energy

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES…:

No more fossil “gasplaining” – going electric is past the tipping point and guaranteed to slash cost of living (Sophie Vorrath, Mar 31, 2025, Renew Economy)

The electrification of Australian homes and vehicles is no longer trade-off between climate action and cost, but a guaranteed way to drive down the cost of living – and a economic policy imperative.

A new report from Rewiring Australia says Australia has passed the “electrification tipping point,” where replacing gas appliances and petrol cars with electric alternatives works out cheaper over a 15-year period, even accounting for any higher up-front costs.

This means, for example, that while an electric heat pump hot water system might cost around $4,000 compared to $1,900 for a gas hot water system, a gas system would spend up to $8,000 on fuel over 15 years, compared to $3,900 on grid electricity for the heat pump, or just $1,000 with rooftop solar. […]

Electric driving, too, is now the lowest cost way to drive including upfront costs, according to Rewiring Australia, offering savings of $1,500 per year in driving costs in 2025, or $2,500 with solar.

Over a 15-year period, electric vehicle drivers could expect a saving of $17,000 with upfront costs included, compared to a similar petrol car, or $35,000 when charging with solar.

Identitarianism Just So Stories

FORGET IT JAKE; IT’S SCIENCE:

What Lies Beyond Cutting-Edge Power Games? (Jeffrey P. Bishop, December 06, 2019, Church Life Journal)

Narratives of cultural progress are intimately tied to notions of moral, political, and scientific progress. The secular version of the progress narrative is that religion is the root of all evil. In relation to morality, the secular story of progress goes something like this: religion is the uneducated man’s morality; now that reason reigns, we can find the foundational moral principle for acting rightly, or the proper moral calculus, without all the make-believe of religion. The political progress story is similar: religion gets in the way of political stability, necessitating the powers of the state to adjudicate disagreements over the common good. The secular story of progress of science continues this theme: religion gets in the way of all the scientific progress, and has been at odds with science from the beginning of time.

We would do well to remember that “progress” in science is what gave us the eugenics movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the preaching of eugenics from the pulpits of many parishes (See: Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics). Progress sacrificed the bodies of Jews to enact the Aryan myth. Progress sacrificed the bodies black men and women for the “good” of medical knowledge. The utilitarian calculus is created, such that we can absorb some degree of transgression into our progress, so that progress can continue as long as there is a net positive moral calculation.

Identitarianism Israel/Palestine

PRETEND POGROM (profanity alert):

Racism in Israeli football did not kick off with Gaza genocide. It has always been in its initial formation (Sebastian Shehadi, 27 March, 2025, The New Arab)


Anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia are a normalised part of Israeli football though over the last 16 months of the genocide in Gaza, it has only grown worse and spread to Western capitals, most recently Amsterdam.

Racism in Israeli football, however, is nothing new. “Let the IDF win and f**k the Arabs. Why is school out [in Gaza]? There are no children left there,” goes a popular chant from one of Israel’s biggest football clubs, Maccabi Tel Aviv FC.

Violent songs such as the above gained international attention in November, following clashes in Amsterdam between locals and Maccabi FC away fans, who were in the city for a UEFA Europa League match against Ajax.

Casually exporting their bigoted antics from Israel to the Dutch capital, much as they have to other cities across Europe over the years, Maccabi’s fans were seen tearing down Palestinian flags hung from peoples’ homes the day before the match. That same afternoon, they toured central Amsterdam yelling racist and violent chants, such as “F**k Arabs…Death to Arabs”, and “we will win, let the IDF win” – while several taxi drivers of Moroccan and Arab descent were harassed, threatened and beaten.

Outraged, groups of Dutch locals attacked Maccabi’s fans the following day, leading to scenes that were abruptly called “antisemitic pogroms” by the Israeli government and Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema. As the facts of Maccabi’s aforementioned racist provocations became clear, Helsema soon retracted and apologised for her sweeping characterisation.

Baseball Identitarianism Immigration

WE DON’T EVEN DESERVE OUR IMMIGRANTS:

The Moving Story of Bringing Baseball Back to Manzanar, Where Thousands of Japanese Americans Were Incarcerated During World War II: In honor of his mother and others imprisoned at the internment camp, baseball player Dan Kwong has restored a diamond in the California desert (Rachel Ng, 3/27/25, Smithsonian)

“Play ball,” the umpire hollered. The modest crowd roared. Little Tokyo Giants lead-off batter Dan Kwong stepped up to the plate. A gust of dry desert wind whipped up the loose sand across the infield. Kwong looked out to the clear-blue skies and craggy Sierra Nevada in the distance, taking in the moment.

“People were cheering,” Kwong reflected. “It was rather surreal that after all these months of work I was actually playing in a real game.”


Baseball game, Manzanar Relocation Center, Calif. / photograph by Ansel Adams Library of Congress
It was a scene plucked out of Ansel Adams’ iconic 1943 photo of a baseball game at California’s Manzanar Relocation Center. Only this time, the date was October 26, 2024, and Kwong and his teammates from the Little Tokyo Giants faced off against the Lodi JACL Templars in the inaugural game at Manzanar National Historic Site—the first since the incarceration camp closed in November 1945. Both well-established Japanese American amateur teams, the Giants beat the Templars handily in an eight-inning game, which was followed by an all-star game where players donned 1940s-style uniforms and played with vintage gloves and bats. The momentous doubleheader marked the soft launch of the newly restored field at Manzanar, a camp where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II.

Film/TV Identitarianism

MAGA ROOTS FOR THE RED SKULL:

Superman vs. the KKK: Hear the 1946 Superman Radio Show That Weakened the Klan (Open Culture, March 28th, 2025)

The year is 1946. World War II has come to an end. And now membership in the Ku Klux Klan starts to rise again. Enter Stetson Kennedy, a human rights activist, who manages to infiltrate the KKK and then figures out an ingenious way to take them down. He contacts the producers of the popular Adventures of Superman radio show, and pitches them on a new storyline: Superman meets and defeats the KKK. Needing a new enemy to vanquish, the producers greenlight the idea.

The 16-episode series, “The Clan of the Fiery Cross,” aired in June 1946 and effectively chipped away at the Klan’s mystique, gradually revealing their secret codewords and rituals. Listen to the episodes above.

Technology

I’M OLD ENOUGH…:

US students to 3D print hypersonic vehicles with Mach 5 speed for military might (Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, 3/26/25, Interesting Engineering)

The U.S. Army has approved a fresh $3.1 million funding to make hypersonic vehicles faster and more affordable.

A team at the University of Arizona College of Engineering is exploring the use of multiple metallic alloys and additive manufacturing to enable fabrication of Mach-X – pronounced mock-ex – aerospace technologies as part of a federal governmental push.

The team, led by Sammy Tin, revealed that the Mach-X vehicles will travel at speeds faster than Mach 5, which is five times the speed of sound and the hypersonic threshold.

…to remember when we’d only ever be able to print shower curtain rings…

Just So Stories

THE WHOLE POINT OF DARWINISM…:

In Genetics, a Tense Coexistence of Mainstream and Fringe Views (Ashley Smart, 03.26.2025, UnDark)


In the summer of 2022, Abdel Abdellaoui was set to give a keynote at the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. But when he learned he’d be sharing a speaker roster with Emil Kirkegaard, Abdellaoui announced on Twitter that he was cancelling his lecture.

Kirkegaard is perhaps best known for his provocative writing on genetics and race. On his blog, he has asserted that Black Americans are less honest and less intelligent than their White counterparts; that affirmative action produces Black and Hispanic doctors who kill people with their incompetence; that Africans are excessively predisposed to violence; and that the hereditarian hypothesis of intelligence — roughly, the idea that races or ancestry groups differ in average intelligence in ways that are substantially attributable to genetics — is “almost certainly true.”

UNLEASHED
Living in the Age of Risky Science: An Undark Special Series.

At the time of the 2022 conference, “this guy was having a bad influence with the crap he was spreading, and the way he behaved online, and he was giving our scientific field a bad name,” recalled Abdellaoui, a geneticist working in the Department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam University Medical Center whose research interests include the genetics of intelligence. Abdellaoui noted in a post on Medium that Kirkegaard had never been part of any credible research program or Ph.D. program, and had a reputation for publishing sloppy scientific work in dubious journals. “I just didn’t want to be associated with that, and I wanted to have that be clear — that he’s not on my team and I’m not on his.” (Kirkegaard did not respond to multiple email requests for an interview for this story.)

Shortly after Abdellaoui announced his withdrawal, he learned that Kirkegaard was scratched from the speaker lineup, and Abdellaoui decided to give the keynote after all. Yet just two years later, Kirkegaard would be back at the ISIR conference podium — a podium that has served as a platform for Kirkegaard and other proponents of the hereditarian hypothesis since long before Abdellaoui’s threatened boycott. Their presence at ISIR, alongside psychologists and geneticists from many of the world’s top research institutions, underscores a complicated reality in this fraught field of study: When it comes to the genetics of intelligence, the line between mainstream and fringe can be hard to pin down, and the work of the former can intertwine with that of the latter in ways that are difficult to disentangle.

…was to justify the Empire by showing “others” inferior.

Anglospherics

THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE:

David Hume’s Stark Warning: Reason Serves Passion (Barry Brownstein, March 25, 2025, The Daily Economy)

For those who believe reason governs them, further consideration of Hume’s philosophy exposes their arrogance.

“Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life,” Hume wrote in his Treatise, than to claim the “pre-eminence of reason above passion.”

By passions, Hume means our predispositions, charged thinking, and emotions generated by beliefs of which we are often unaware. Hume argues, “reason alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition.” He adds, “I infer, that the same faculty [reason] is as incapable of preventing volition, or of disputing the preference with any passion or emotion.”

Hume argues our “passions” come first, and then we use “reason” to justify what our emotions have decided. We think reason drives our decision-making bus, but reason is often only a passenger.

The notion of Reason is a conceit.

Academia

COLLEGES ARE HOTBEDS OF CONSERVATISM (profanity alert):

The Corporate Raid on Campus: Finance industry recruiters are starving critical fields of talent and steering an entire generation into soulless jobs. (Zach Marcus, March 23, 2025, Washington Monthly)


Like many incoming freshmen, Audrey arrived at Middlebury College without a clear plan for her future. “I knew pretty much nothing about finance,” she admitted. “I watched Succession.” But she was certain about one thing: securing a successful, well-paying career during college was nonnegotiable. After attending a high school with an “extreme amount of wealth” and now navigating a similarly privileged environment at Middlebury as a student on financial aid, she felt constantly reminded, “S[***], I need to make money.”

Although she had previously explored opportunities in public law—volunteering at a free legal center where she simplified legal documents to make them accessible for young people and interning at a court—at college it was hard to resist the pull of the finance recruiting machine. Jokingly dubbed the “Middlebury Mafia,” the school’s finance network is vast and the on-campus recruiting is intensive: newsletters, information sessions, networking breakfasts, and even curated trips to New York City, where students meet Middlebury finance alumni and get a taste of their world (parties included). “I signed up for all the career center materials, but finance was the only thing I saw,” Audrey told me.

One side effect of the high cost of elite schools is that the kids come from elite families so they’re focussed on a high paying career, not activism.

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